I’m Looking for God in an Egyptian Locker Room

The men’s changing room at Gold’s Gym in Maadi has all your standard fixtures: cubbies with programmable locks, hot showers, a sauna, and prayer mats. Prayer mats! Little patterned rugs, rolled up in the corner of the room. At any given time, someone is praying. Sometimes two or three men at once, foreheads to the ground in the middle of the locker room. One guy says “Alaaaaaaahu akbar” in the softest, faintest voice — facing Mecca and, funnily enough, the scale.

I know that it’s never a good idea to stare in a locker room. I can’t pull my eyes away, though. I’m putting on my shorts, lacing up my sambas, and trying to put my finger on what I’m feeling. It’s jealousy, I decide. Maybe envy. It’s clear to me that these dudes aren’t, like, showing off or anything. But it feels like they are. I’m almost offended. But they’re not thinking about whether prayer is the right move or not. They just do, because it’s what you do.

I’m imagining myself in their place — in Egypt or anywhere. If I hit my knees and started praying in public, what would everyone think? Would people laugh at me behind my back? The fact that I’m asking myself these questions tells me a lot about an internalized perception of religious people that I still carry around with me — that prayer is weakness, not strength — and that reliance on God is not for smart people.

And yet, for these guys, it doesn’t seem to carry any weight at all. For me, there’s so much wrapped up in it — to speak to God in public, in my AA-branded “Change or Die, Motherfucker” tank top, between sets — it’s scary to me to the point that I don’t even start. Instead, I sit down and open my iPad to try to figure it out.

***

I haven’t prayed since I got to Egypt.

It’s not Easter here, but God has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m writing this on our Palm Sunday — Coptic Easter is next week. Instead of attending the service at the Cave Church in Cairo, I slept in, walked the same walk I always walk to the sunny garden café around the corner, and had a friend over to the apartment. I edited videos while she did her Arabic homework. We ate pizza and talked about how we definitely should have gone to the service. She tells me she’s Lebanese catholic — whatever that means. I picture her in a pleated skirt and necktie, which is about as far as my understanding of Catholicism goes.

She suggested we travel to a monastery next week. Steep overcorrection, I said — but I’m not against it.

***

Last year, I traveled through a lot of Muslim-majority countries, and that travel had me keen on the ideas of God, of Christianity, and — as I told a friend over coffee in New York — “even, like, Jesus Christ.” It’s hard for me to get my heart around, though. My head is closer— I get it in theory. I wish it were the other way — where my heart felt this doting presence and wanted to cultivate that relationship, and my head was where I got hung up. That I could work with.

See, I’m fascinated by Islam in a way that I’m not emotionally gripped by Christianity. As a certified lazybones who often romanticizes five more minutes behind the comfort of my own eyelids every morning, the rigor of daily life is aspirational to me. Five prayers a day, the physical discipline, there’s a structure there that doesn’t question you how you feel about it — it just demands you to show up. That was something I learned in early sobriety, that I get. You act as if until the feeling shows up. I want a relationship with a God who loves me for me, and a non-trivial part of that deal is that my foreskin stays intact. You know— like how God made me. For that reason alone, I don’t think I could stomach converting.

Christianity, on the other hand, has always seemed too good to be true, intact genitalia notwithstanding. But “grace without works” has been my main gripe since as far back as I can remember. I find myself going down a rabbit hole and googling “Ephesians 2:8 vs. James 2:14 contradictory?”, and scoffing at the AI generated response that tells these passages are, in fact, complementary to one another. Why am I trying to poke holes??

I’m equally drawn to the idea that I can’t earn any of this as I am appalled by it. It’s all gift, and I get to stop auditioning for God. What a relief! At the same time, when I step into the locker room and see a prayer mat it exposes me: if I really believed what I say I believe, why is it so hard to actually do anything about it?

I wonder if we all struggle with surrender. I don’t like feeling like the only one.

I read a post on Instagram the other day from a friend who says he “met Jesus Christ” four years ago, and how it’s been this explosive, life-changing energy ever since. And I look at him, and I look at my other friends who have Christianity in their lives, and they’re so happy — in a disarming and freaky way that I’m not. Genuinely well-intentioned and full of this joy and desire to share it.

That’s real faith, I tell myself. Two different things I admire enormously. Radiant joy on one side. Unwavering discipline on the other. Absolute love on both. And I’m standing outside of each, unsure which door is mine — or if I deserve to walk through either one. The idea of deserving anything at all comes up a lot for me. Logically, I know what my friends on both sides would say to that.

Here’s what I’ve found: when I significantly lower my threshold for what qualifies as a miracle in my own life, I start seeing miracles everywhere.

I do have a problem with Easter, I think to myself. With the resurrection specifically. I don’t buy it.

But wait — seriously, why not?

Ok, I can really get into the Big Bang as an act of divine providence. I buy that God can create absolutely everything, including you and me, from an impossible point of singularity. It isn’t difficult for me to believe that we are currently experiencing the big bang — the same initial act of divine creation, playing out over billions of years. From One, suddenly, slowly, everything. That sounds like something you’d read about in Genesis. And if I indulge this notion — the creation of everything from nothing — then surely the Son of God coming back from the dead is not the craziest miracle on the list. I think the miracles are set up that way on purpose.

Wine first, then resurrection.

Here’s what I’ve found: when I significantly lower my threshold for what qualifies as a miracle in my own life, I start seeing miracles everywhere. I’ve yet to see burning bushes and parted seas — but I have found myself, against all odds, healthy and living in a place where I feel the presence of God all around me. That’s pretty damn miraculous.

I marvel at the incredible improbability of any of this. I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which the author talks in a lovely way about how the math on our existence is staggering. The absolute infinitesimality of ever being here at all — let alone being here as we are, right now, in these specific bodies on this specific planet — is more than enough to sell me on a divine, intelligent, benevolent creator. My own life is too good to not owe to something.

So who am I to get hung up on something so trivial as the resurrection when I see these miracles all around me?

***

The priest at the Coptic church in Alexandria asked me this last year, on the Pentecost. I’d attended an Arabic-language service, understanding nothing, with a friend who was studying at Princeton Theological Seminary.

“So, what are you?” the priest asked.

I stared at him. I was shocked to realize I didn’t have an answer. My eyes darted around the hall for my friend to come save me.

Episcopalian, I was told, is the correct answer.

***

I think about Chance the Rapper, who has this line I heard when I was 20 — “I speak to God in public, I speak to God in public. He think the new shit jam; I think we mutual fans”. I was years away from having any framework for faith or understanding of God outside of taking LSD on a semi-regular basis, and it still smacked me when I heard it. The idea that God might be a fan of mine. That the relationship could run in both directions. That he talks to God in public — and says it with swagger. I wanted that then, and I still do. I really dig the idea that you don’t just worship upward into silence but that something up there is watching you back, positively delighted.

I wouldn’t have any real desire to cultivate a relationship with God for another seven or eight years after hearing that line. But it landed anyway. It sat in my head the way those prayer mats sit in the corner of my locker room — waiting for something to give.

***

In Cairo, the call to prayer goes out five times a day from thousands of minarets across the city. You hear it whether you want to or not. You see it at noon from the back of your scooter when Dhuhr spills out of the mosques and onto the steps and into the streets. Millions of people stop at the same time to thank God for what they have. Prayer is often silent. It’s also impossible to ignore. If you’re at the gym, it’s no excuse to miss one.

I downloaded an app called Muslim Pro during Ramadan because I wanted a countdown to sunset, when everyone would break their fast. The app is simple — it tells you when the last prayer was and how long until the next one. Fajr is around 4:30am, when the first light barely cracks the horizon. The muezzins climb their minarets and call out: Come pray. Come to success. Prayer is better than sleep.

Still, nothing.

I keep telling myself to start, then getting upset with myself when I don’t. When I get into a rhythm of prayer — of conscious, daily appreciation for my life and health and for the world around me — things go well. The day feels lighter. I feel the connection. And when I fall out of rhythm, like I have since getting to Egypt, I can explain the absence away with language and justification and thinking. I’m a writer, dammit. I can think my way into or out of pretty much anything.

But this is, again, not a head problem. I keep reminding myself it’s a heart problem. And heart problems are the hardest kind, because they can’t be explained away with language. I can’t make up a new word like infinitesimality and I can’t write an essay that will convince me to hit my knees tonight. I can’t publish a substack so good it takes the place that ninety seconds of “Thank you God, God help me” serves.

I’m envious because the men at the gym don’t think about any of this. They just unroll the mat and do the thing.

I want to have the confidence to speak to God in public. I also want to be the best at talking to God in public. I want to have the confidence to trust myself so implicitly that I don’t doubt for a second that what I’m doing is me. Maybe I need to get it through my head that if I can’t be bothered to get on my knees before bed, when no one is around, when I really need it — then what’s the point? Maybe the point is to start there.

Progressive overload, that’s called.

My friend and I are going to the monastery next week. Steep overcorrection, but maybe it’s what I need.